I installed mandrake but after i booted it went to the console or prompt instead of the desktop. I wanted to know if I am supposed to have a root, /, and a home partition because it doesnt go to the desktop. Pease help!

are you asking if the number of partitions you have affects wether you go straight to X windows or not? that's totally irrelevant. the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. if you want to go stright to X you need to set it in the mandrake control center, at the boot section.

Hey what i like to, because I got usta have low disk space, is create a partition that is double the RAM and leave it for swap. The rest I leave for the root partition( / ). This way nothing runs out disk space first.

also means that if that one partition is somehow damaged, it takes the whole ship down with it, and upggrading and reinstalling a system is much more drawn out and damaging

Personally I have 6 partitions:
/boot = 5Mb
SWAP = 512Mb
/ = 1Gb
/root = 1Gb
/home = 1Gb
/usr = 8Gb

I do also have a 7th, onto which I install other distros to try.

As acid_kewpie said, partitions and runlevels aren't related. If your system doesn't boot into the GUI, but you would like it to, edit your /etc/inittab file and alter the runlevel. Log in as root, and at the command prompt type "vi /etc/inittab" (no qoutes). Hit the insert key and navigate the cursor to the line which reads "id:3:initdefault:" (descriptions of the different runlevels apppear just above this line; runlevel 5 is the GUI for Mandrake). Replace the "3" with "5", hit esc to exit insert mode, then type :wq to write the change and quit vi. The next time you boot, the system should read the change you've made to the file and boot directly to the GUI (if X is configured correctly, of course).